re: Cursive Writing, Should this be mandated in elementary school?

well you do have to sign in cursive when buying a car etc and when a student takes the ACT they have to write and sign the disclosure in cursive or at least they used to.

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This is especially true since some of what she is stating is not really consistent with the research on brain development

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Where's your evidence?

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And interestingly there is this new thing called computers that people can use to write even faster, and since the essay on the SAT is no longer required, it's a moot point anyways.

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Self-generated production of cursive letters during learning led to the recruitment of a sensori-motor network known to also be active during letter perception and reading, however, passive observation of a letter being formed did not. This finding adds to the growing literature suggesting that self-generated writing is important for setting up reading networks in the developing brain. Nonetheless, perceiving cursive letters did not affect brain activation any more than perceiving printed letters, suggesting that the motoric production of text stimuli is the crucial factor in creating this network, rather than the type of letter perceived or produced.

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LINK This study suggests cursive may not provide additional benefit over print but handwriting is definitely better than typing in children.

However, this one in adults says their may be a difference.

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In adults, a dissociation between processing cursive letters and hand-printed ones has been documented (Qiao et al., 2010; Longcamp et al., 2011) suggesting an important difference between the two, at least in terms of neural processing. The results reported by Longcamp et al. (2011), revealed several regions of the adult brain that were recruited more for handwritten cursive letters than for printed ones, but no regions that were recruited more for printed letters. Several factors likely contribute to this difference in research findings. The first is that adults have had more extensive interactions with cursive letters.

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Engineering students don't learn to use a slide rule anymore either. Times change.

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Where's your evidence?

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Well the critical periods for both language and cognitive abilities (Working Memory) are generally prior to when cursive is introduced in the classroom.

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This study suggests cursive may not provide additional benefit over print but handwriting is definitely better than typing in children.

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Then the extra time teaching cursive, beyond teaching basic printing, is not the best use of time.

I'm not debating that there aren't benefits to actually writing with pen and paper, I'm just arguing that cursive does not provide a benefit that justifies the resources that can be spent elsewhere.

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If you want to be able to take notes at a decent speed you need to know cursive.

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That's debatable and indivdual specific. Besides, shorthand would probably be the most efficient anyways so why not teach that?

Or better yet, maybe we could focus more on note-taking and organizational strategies that would be useful across many domains.

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Writing crystallizes thought.

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This doesn't require cursive though.

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Yes, because this would be much easier than cursive for a bunch of 3rd graders to learn....

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I'm not advocating for that, I was just replying to the notion regarding speed.

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I'm not advocating for that, I was just replying to the notion regarding speed.

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sorry, when you described shorthand as follows...

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shorthand would probably be the most efficient anyways so why not teach that?

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I thought you were advocating for it replacing cursive. My mistake.

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these dumbasses write like 5yo's n can't spell and can't add or subtract

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So your argument is that if we teach kids to write in cursive they'll be able to add and subtract? I agree that our education system underperforms, but not because of cursive. The last 20+ years has seen test scores decline on the world stage and we've taught cursive that whole time.